Reading American Art

Front Cover
Yale University Press, Jan 1, 1998 - Art - 470 pages
This anthology brings together twenty outstanding works of recent scholarship on the history of the visual arts in the United States from the colonial period to 1945. The selected essays--all written within the past two decades--reflect the interdisciplinary character of current art historiography in America and the variety of approaches that contribute to the dynamism in the field. The authors take up diverse subjects--from colonial portraits to nineteenth-century sculptures of women to photographic images of New York--and invite those with a general knowledge of the history of American art to think more deeply about art and culture.

Employing many interpretive methodologies, including iconology, social history, structuralism, psychobiography, and feminist theory, the contributors to this volume combine close analysis of specific art objects or groups of objects with discussion of how these works of art operated within their cultural contexts. The authors consider the works of such artists as John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock as they assess how paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, and photographs have carried meaning within American society. And they investigate how the conceptualization, production, and presentation of works of art both inform and are informed by prevailing attitudes toward the role of the arts and the artist in American culture.

 

Contents

The Portraits of John Singleton Copley
12
The Artist
38
Thomas Cole and the Aristocracy
79
Culture and Commerce in Nineteenth
109
William Sidney Mount and the Formation
128
George Catlins Depictions of the Mandan
150
The Greek Slave
163
The Western Landscape as Symbol
208
Painter of Women and Children
280
New York in the Photographers Eye
302
OKeeffe and the Masculine Gaze
350
Charles Sheelers
371
Grant Woods American Gothic
387
Isabel Bishops Deferential
409
Representing the Unconscious
440
Contributors
465

The Gross Clinic or Portrait of Professor Gross
232
Winslow Homer in His Art
264

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About the author (1998)

Marianne Doezema is director of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. Elizabeth Milroy, associate professor of art at Wesleyan University, teaches art history and American studies.

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